1. Field of the Disclosure
The present disclosure relates to an Internet of things (IoT) technology, and more particularly, to an IoT gateway and an operating method of the same.
2. Description of the Related Art
As it has become possible to connect to the Internet through various smart devices such as a smart phone, a smart pad, a smart sensor, a smart television (TV), and a smart car, smart devices are getting bound up with real life. For this reason, it is expected that the number of smart devices owned by each person will further increase compared to the current number of smart devices owned by each person, and about 25 billion devices will be connected based on the wireless Internet.
Due to the development of smart devices, recently, research is intensively being conducted on the IoT, such as machine to machine (M2M) communication, IoT communication, intuitive Internet of things (I2oT) communication, web of things (WoT) communication, and the like. In the IoT, sensors are connected to an external network through a network system, and sensing results of the sensors are processed and managed in real time. The final aim of the IoT is to implement an environment in which it is possible to communicate anywhere and anytime, regardless of network, device, and service, by giving computing and communication functions to all things.
Such an IoT service requires a router and a gateway for connecting various IoT devices to a network.
However, most gateways for providing an IoT service are manufactured in the form of a dongle and directly connected to a router that is a network device. In other words, gateways have limitations on their installation environments. For this reason, connection to various kinds of IoT devices (e.g., a refrigerator, a TV, an electric rice cooker, an air conditioner, a washing machine, lighting fixtures, a tablet personal computer (PC), etc.) in a house or a specific space is limited, and it is difficult to provide a broad IoT service.
To overcome the disadvantage of direct connection between a router and a gateway, it is possible to connect a gateway to a router in a wireless manner such as wireless fidelity (WiFi). However, to connect a gateway to a router in a wireless manner, it is necessary for the gateway to additionally have an input device or a display device for inputting or displaying a service set identification (SSID) and a password of the router. Therefore, the size and manufacturing cost of the gateway increase.
Also, when an existing gateway attempts to wirelessly access a router using WiFi and the SSID of the router is in Korean, the gateway may not accurately display the Korean SSID of the router, and it may be difficult to identify the router. For this reason, it is not possible to access the router that the gateway attempts to access.
Further, when there are a plurality of accessible routers, an existing gateway has no choice but to arrange the routers in alphabetical order of their SSID rather than in order of their signal strength. Therefore, it is difficult to select a router with a high signal strength.
In addition, since an existing gateway is manufactured to support only a single communication protocol, it is difficult to connect the gateway to IoT devices that use various kinds of communication protocols.